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Ireland on Thursday became thus far the only country of the European Union’s 27-member bloc to hold a referendum over the Treaty of Lisbon. The outcome of Ireland’s vote will not be made public until the close of the day on June 13, leaving many EU bureaucrats anxiously waiting to know the fate of their union. The treaty has a slight majority of support inside of Ireland, though the low voter turnout has left it a coin toss of an outcome.
When the European Union was established in 1993 from the European Community, it was made up of only 15 western European countries that were all at around the same level of development. The purpose of the European Union was to be a unified governing and economic body — a hybrid of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism, transcending the different nations’ differences.
Speed forward to today: Now the European Union’s 27 members range from densely populated and wealthy states such as France and Germany to the poor new members such as Romania and Bulgaria. The union now is a mixture of members that have agricultural, industrial or service-based economies and new members that spent half of the last century under the Iron Curtain.
In short, the EU member states have different views of politics, security and economic models; not to mention, many EU members do not exactly fully trust the others — especially those they have been to war with on the continent in the past century.
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